Sunday, November 15, 2009

At 39, Loung Ung enters a new phase of writing and storytelling

Loung Ung has broken bread with Queen Noor of Jordan, lunched with Paul McCartney and opened her own restaurant, Bar Cento, in Ohio City.

At 39, she is a world away from the childhood starvation that distended belly and drove her to swallow rotten leaves. Born into an upper-middle-class family, Ung was 10 when she fled Cambodia with an older brother. Eventually, they learned that more than 20 relatives, including both their parents, had been murdered by the Khmer Rouge.

Those privations are contained in her 2000 memoir, "First They Killed My Father," a story that Ung tells in a child's voice. It is now widely taught and has been translated into 10 languages.

Critics have praised her as the Anne Frank of Pol Pot's killing fields.

Nevertheless, Ung said she was surprised to be asked to speak Sunday at the Cleveland Public Library. The memoirist and activist described the invitation as an unanticipated honor.

For local authors, it signals an arrival of sorts. Ung, who lives in Shaker Heights, will deliver her speech in English, her fourth language, after Khmer, Chinese and French. In advance of the Writers & Readers talk, she agreed to answer a few questions.

In your peripatetic anti-land mine work, you've become a professional lecturer. How do you find the proper distance for telling your own story?

My work has evolved from personal writing, writing that was therapeutic, a way to take away the power of those soldiers, who were monsters and gods of mythical proportion.

It changed next to activist writing, interviews with those at the rehabilitation centers [in Cambodia], writing that can actually do something. Now I write because I really enjoy it. I'm in a third phase that combines the internal and external. Honestly, I love it.

Memoir as a genre has taken a beating since the James Frey fiasco. Where do you see it now?

I think it is swinging back. I'm one who believes there are always going to be a few bad apples. And I've read many novels that are inauthentic.

Memoir is a collection of memories -- different from biography or autobiography. For me, it started as a beautiful form. People tell me all the time that my books read like novels.

One hundred and 20 million people have survived some kind of war. And the stories of all the Cambodians who survived seem like fiction to Americans. I get mail every day from readers, and they often say it took them years to open my book.

You know with something called "First They Killed my Father" that you're not in for a funny, rock 'n' roll ride.

Your second book, "Lucky Child," focuses on the parallel life of your older sister, Chou, who stayed in Cambodia. How is she now?

She's fabulous. She's 41 and a grandmother for the second time. She's really happy.

When I last saw her, I was watching her brush her hair. Most Cambodian girls do have long hair, and the bonding thing between sisters and cousins is you brush each other's hair.

She asks me, "Who brushes your hair?" and I have to say, "I do." It is so good for me to spend time around her. I've been back to Cambodia many, many times.

You've suggested, intriguingly, that your family may have picked you, the sixth of seven children, to escape with your brother because you were combative, and therefore more likely to survive but harder to marry off in Cambodia.

In every culture, being a tomboy is not highly prized. But my father praised me; he saw it as a sort of cleverness. My mother didn't like it. She'd always been two-dimensional to me -- my mother, my father's wife. [Ung last saw her mother alive when she was 8.]

But I'm writing a book now about my mother, and I'm newly in love with her. I've interviewed her best friend, my uncle and my aunt. She was really funny and spunky and a woman before her time.